How the Country’s Top Chefs Are Reimagining Favorite Chicken Recipes

Have you heard? The sky is falling, and, quite apropos: Chicken is king. It may be the recent election season, evoking that promise that now seems so innocent and unlikely of a chicken in every pot. Or perhaps chicken is simply in tune with today’s modish minimalism? Something else?

In any case, there are chickens, chickens everywhere and endless roasts to eat. For a cursory inventory of sightings in my hometown: There is a nearly famous roast chicken at Le Turtle on the Lower East Side; a genuinely famous truffle-gilded one at the Nomad, in the Flatiron District; Mission Chinese’s boiled egg–stuffed chicken; “Hell Chicken” at Achilles Heel in Brooklyn; and a fried-chicken standoff between Shake Shack and David Chang. Café Altro Paradiso’s pork Milanese is now a pollo one. The ascendant chicken—often, by the way, falsely accused of being incapable of flight—isn’t only an American phenomenon. London has Hélène Darroze’s Poulet du Dimanche, a weekend meal of consommé and chicken for two. Paris has, since 2012, been home to Antoine Westermann’s Le Coq Rico (nicknamed “The Bistro of Beautiful Birds”). In spring a branch opened in Manhattan.

How good can the humble yard bird get? I decide to conduct a bit of research over takeout. I’d planned on fried-chicken sandwiches from David Chang’s Fuku, for which I have heard of lines around the block. But to my dismay, my Upper West Side perch lies outside its delivery domain. I quickly settle on a Plan B: the whole fried chicken from Chang’s Má Pêche. While I wait, I brush up on some history.

The domestic chicken’s ancestor was the sublimely named Gallus gallus, the wild red jungle fowl of Asia. It was domesticated around 2000 b.c. in the Indus Valley, according to Mesopotamian cuneiforms, not for meat but for fighting. My 1850 Ornamental and Domestic Poultry: Their History and Management, by the Reverend Edmund Saul Dixon, notes ecstatically that “next to the Dog, the Fowl has been the most constant attendant upon Man in his migrations and his occupation of strange lands.” (The book advises using poultry in various tinctures and concoctions to cure cough, fever, and other such trivial ailments, for example “poison, corns on the toes, the bites of mad dogs and vipers, and frenzy.”) The cock is the symbol of masculinity. In Dixon’s words: “His politeness to females is as marked as were Lord Chesterfield’s attentions to old ladies, and much more unaffected.” Alexandre Dumas recalls in Grande Dictionnaire de Cuisine (1873) that zoological collector François Levaillant’s rooster was the only animal in his menagerie unfazed by the roar of a lion.

This does not nearly bring me up to date, but it is time for dinner—and Má Pêche’s fried chicken is delicious. The meat is downy as a pillow. Munching distractedly on a wing—or perhaps a bit of spicy, crunchy thigh?—I note that unless this chicken tastes naturally of habanero, I’m not tasting chicken at all. Julia Child wrote about this in Mastering the Art of French Cooking: “Modern poultry raising has done wonders in making it possible to grow a fine-looking chicken in record time and to sell it at a most reasonable price, but rarely does anyone in the country discuss flavor. If you are interested in price alone, you will often end up with something that tastes like the stuffing inside a teddy bear.”

I resume my research, chewing on my son’s teddy bear, and read that the biggest change in American chicken came in 1948, when the grocery chain A&P sponsored a “Chicken of Tomorrow” contest. The winner, a Cornish Cross—the breed used for almost all meat chickens today—was chosen for fast growth. The truly astonishing thing is that the contest had no criteria for taste. Was my Má Pêche chicken a Cornish Cross? Almost certainly. I can find out only that it was “raised at a farm in New Jersey.” But I learn via telephone that the chicken at the Nomad, called Green Circle chicken, is raised by Amish farmers on scraps from an open-air vegetable market and supplied by D’Artagnan’s founder, Ariane Daguin. This sounds promising, and I am especially drawn to the chicken burger and chicken potpie on the Nomad’s bar menu. (The bar, for the record, is reached by walking through a hallway one is sure will deposit one in the powder room.)

I am stunned by the Plymouth Rock, which smells like hay and has a marigold-yellow, pork-style fat cap beneath its skin. Its flesh is silky and grassy, bringing to mind smoked sablefish

I eat both in a single meal, beginning prudently with the chicken burger. This is not as dietetic as it sounds, but a marvel of ground chicken thigh, truffle, and brioche crumbs, wrapped in chicken skin, steamed, then deep fried. It is scooped from hot fat, crisp as a fresh bill, topped with foie gras and truffle and more fried-chicken skin, and delivered at a near sprint from the kitchen. It is followed with a chicken potpie that lifts the entire category. My memory of its precise contents is fogged with fumes of foie gras and truffle, which are in both the pie and its tableside garnishes, the foie gras as a seared slab, the truffle as a last-minute bavarois. I accompany it with a house beer called Poulet, which is not meant to taste like chicken but is brewed to accompany the Nomad’s potpie. The Viognier I order to be provident is a better fit, though I would not have kicked the Poulet out of bed, and I am fairly sure I finished it without noticing while eating dessert—which was something like Oreo truffles.

The meal is a prodigious improvement on the grilled chicken breast of yesteryear. But how many of the chickens’ qualities am I able to discern through the appurtenances of foie gras and truffle? I telephone Ariane Daguin, who speaks with a gorgeously thick Gascogn accent and who tells me the chicken I ate was a Cornish Cross, but that it led a longer (and more humane) life than a typical commercial chicken’s.

She then tells me of another chicken she sells, a French breed from Landes, raised in Pennsylvania and even older. This leaves me a number of questions. I, like any critical eater, have contemplated chickens’ lives and diets—“free range” and “antibiotic free” rattle around in my head as I shop. But I’ve never given a thought to searching out a better breed. And is older chicken better?

I adjourn for further study to the chef’s bar at Le Coq Rico, just to the left of a wall-size fluorescent-blue outline of what looks like an insane chicken. After a delightful salad of confited gizzards—a food I’d never liked and now do—and artichokes, I elect to taste a flight of chickens from the Whole Birds section of the menu, where they are offered by breed and length of life. Chef Westermann, here from Paris, recommends three: a Plymouth Rock—90 days; a New Hampshire—120 days; and a Catskill Guinea Fowl—130 days. The last isn’t strictly a chicken, but chef Westermann is too enthusiastic to be denied.

Each bird is presented, trussed and newly roasted, in a Staub gratin before being cut up and returned, accompanied by a little white pitcher of chicken jus. The first thing one notices is the chickens’ size—they are small and compact—and the second is their shape. I am accustomed to chickens’ looking round, like spheres mounted onto a frame—plump, round legs, melon-like breasts. These birds are narrow; their breastbones protrude. Their legs are long and thin.

And the flavors! I am stunned by the Plymouth Rock, which smells like hay and has a marigold-yellow, pork-style fat cap beneath its skin. Its flesh is silky and grassy, bringing to mind smoked sablefish. The New Hampshire has meat that is almost lavender and tastes closer to an oyster, or perhaps Lardo di Colonnata cured in ancient marble, than to any chicken I’ve ever eaten. It’s rich in umami, that indescribable flavor in soy sauce, Parmesan cheese, truffles, and aged meat. (I ask executive chef Guillaume Ginther if the chicken has indeed been aged and am clucked into silence. “He ran a lot,” he says. “He is like a sportif chicken.”) Finally, there is the Guinea Fowl, a descendant of the pheasant, whose meat is as dark and rich as duck confit.

It is as though sun has broken through a haze. I ask chef Westermann, who has stopped by repeatedly to dote on his chickens, where I can learn more about these strange and wonderful birds.

This is how I find myself a few days later driving from Wichita, Kansas, to a white Victorian farmhouse marked by a sign reading good shepherd turkey ranch. I’m greeted by three breeds of geese—sleek, gray Toulouse, slim African, and Embden—a cacophony of clucks, and finally by Frank Reese, the fourth-generation heritage breed–poultry farmer whom Westermann had called, captivatingly, “the man of the situation.” Reese, who is fit, with piercing blue eyes and a trim silver mustache, introduces me to his five breeds of chicken—the stock for two of which has been in his family for 100 years—while rattling off more facts about the poultry industry, past and present, than a single article could contain.

The chickens look like none I’ve seen in real life. For one, they range in color from the most startling striped pattern—called “barring”—to deep mahogany edged in amber to ebony. “No one used to raise white chickens,” Reese says. They were too easily spotted by hawks. “Chickens are white today because if you remove the ink from the quill they’re easier to pluck.” But the pigment in feathers makes them stronger, which is better for the chicken. His birds run around their long red barns vigorously, mixing and mingling. I’m infatuated with the striped Barred Rocks, about which Reese says, “These are America’s first birds. The birds that started the poultry industry in America.” Up until 1950, he tells me, they were what people thought of as chicken.

Reese’s chickens are not only better tasting than any I’ve ever had. They are healthier. He shows me a study from Kansas State University concluding that their meat contains more omega-3 fatty acids than other breeds, whether pastured or not. Plus, a chicken’s meat naturally gets darker, more oxygenated, healthier, if it runs around. His birds’ ages—all are three to four times older than the typical Cornish Cross—are necessary to their size. They are naturally slow growing. This gives their muscles a chance to become both flavorful and oxygenated—i.e., good for you. A farmer can’t just let a Cornish Cross live longer in service of tastier, healthier meat, because, in Reese’s words, they are “genetically extreme animals.” The average Cornish Cross couldn’t run and roost if it were allowed to. Their bodies can’t support their weight beyond a month or two of life. This is confirmed by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Jim Keen, who puts it in even sharper perspective: “If a Cornish Cross were human, it would be like a two-month-old weighing 660 pounds.

I learn more horrifying things about the poultry industry. But to end on a high note, once we’ve finished in the barns, Reese invites me inside to look at the American Standard of Perfection, a bewitchingly named book that has been issued every five or so years since 1874 and contains the specifications for every American Standard–bred chicken. Each breed, Reese tells me, has a culinary purpose, and if one breeds according to the standard, one’s birds will be delicious. I ask him about the high price. To raise a bird like his means feeding it three times as long as other birds. “In the 1930s,” he tells me, “chicken cost more per pound than beef. That should be the case now.”

The real test, of course, will be cooking these birds at home. It is tempting to ask if I can cull from Reese’s flocks, but that seems, in the moment, ill-mannered. Luckily, one can order them in a three-pack, one of each breed, from Heritage Foods USA for $115.

Once I receive mine, I must decide what to do. This would seem a cakewalk, given the number of chicken recipes in our digitally fecund world. But Reese had been adamant and a bit marmish on this point: I was not to even consider a recipe written after 1950, at which point the Cornish Cross—which he does not consider a chicken—was widespread.

I consult The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book—published in 1954, but full of recipes from earlier—and am overwhelmed by promising entries. I cannot articulate how disappointing it is to have to jettison Messy Chicken à la Berrichonne, for which I am quite willing to procure brandy and good Bordeaux, and even to thicken my sauce with flour and an additional two egg yolks, but whose “blood of the chicken in which a few drops of vinegar was mixed when the chicken was killed” simply proves too much of a logistical hassle. And I sigh unhappily, as anyone sensible would, at not having a broad enough topic to justify attempting Giant Squab in Pajamas . . . . I settle for the first bird, a compact New Hampshire, on Toklas’s Roast Chicken in Cream. I leave out the cream and add rosemary, and land, in about an hour, on a buttery and delectable pot roast, which is declared a triumph.

For my Plymouth Barred Rock I try Toklas’s Chicken Sauté à la Forestière. Instead of morels I sauté oyster mushrooms, and instead of pig fat I add duck fat. But otherwise, I follow the recipe to the word. It is another success, the meat dense with flavor, slightly musty, the whole dish foresty and rich without being heavy.The last chicken, a heritage-breed Cornish, I feel I must fry. This presents some challenges. Mrs. Lincoln’s 1884 Boston Cook Book directs me to fry in lard, which requires my husband to spend a morning rendering five pounds of pig fat in our guest kitchen, to spare the rest of our house from what Mrs. Lincoln calls “a very disagreeable odor.” I follow all her further recommendations: frying at 385 degrees (I think; I discover I have no fat thermometer); removing breast from bone; dredging with salt, pepper, and flour; and cooking until “brown and tender, but not burned.”

I happen to have a Freedom Ranger—a bird similar to the Cornish Cross, though slightly more mobile—from a local farm on hand, which I subject to the exact same treatment. We invite friends over and serve the two chickens side by side. There is no contest. The little Cornish, which takes a few more minutes to fry, is in a class of its own. It is entirely unlike the Freedom Ranger. It is unlike, in fact, any other fried chicken I’ve had. Its meat does not taste of its brine. Its crisp coating serves only to make a shattering shield for the deep-flavored meat within. It tastes like . . . well, I suppose it tastes like chicken. And there is nothing else that tastes anything like it.